I'm not usually a spiritual person or someone who easily senses the supernatural, but I have one terrifying memory from the past. It was summer, five years ago, sometime in July I believe. Back then, at a pretty mature age, I was completely hooked on survival games—or airsoft, as some call it. For those who don't know, it's basically a game of territory capture using toy airguns that shoot plastic pellets. Because the summer days were too hot, we specialized in night games. That weekend, a dozen or so of us gathered by the riverbed of the Kinu River in Tochigi Prefecture, northern Kanto, enjoying a night battle. I remember checking my watch; it was just a little before 1:00 AM. During one of the rounds, I was assigned to defend the flag (the team that captures the enemy's flag wins), and I was lying low in the bushes behind our flag, waiting in ambush. Our team was winning this time, and the sound of airguns echoed from deep within the enemy's territory far in the distance. There was no human presence around me at all. To be honest, it was boring, but I couldn't let my guard down because sometimes players would circle around the field to launch a surprise attack. Since we were by the river, there was no lighting other than the moonlight, and it was so pitch black you literally couldn't see your hand in front of your face. As I slowly turned my head to stay alert (though I had to be careful not to make sudden movements that would give away my position), I noticed the upper body of a person sticking out from a bush about 50 meters away. It was a figure of a woman with shoulder-length hair, wearing a whitish short-sleeved shirt, staring right at me.
Airsoft guns are just toys, but they still pack a punch. If you take a direct hit to the face or eyes, it can cause a serious injury. That's why the rule was that if an outsider ever wandered onto the field during a game, the match had to be stopped immediately. I immediately shouted at the top of my lungs, "There's a civilian here! Stop! Everyone stop!" From the front lines, I could hear voices echoing back, "Stop!" and "They're calling a halt!" Thinking I should apologize to the person, I dashed toward the bushes. The woman just kept staring straight at me. Right as I opened my mouth to say, "I'm sorry," the figure smoothly glided away and disappeared into the woods. *Oh crap, I probably terrified her,* I thought—considering I was wearing camouflage gear, had my face painted black, and was holding a gun. I rushed toward the woods to follow her, but even with my flashlight sweeping the area, she was nowhere to be found. Soon, the other members gathered around. I explained what happened, and we all spent over ten minutes searching the area while calling out, but we couldn't find her anywhere. We searched the woods thoroughly, yet she had completely vanished.
I was starting to get genuinely creeped out by what I had seen. Why would a woman be walking around a place like this past midnight? Besides, to get to the spot where I first saw her, she would have had to cross right through the active field. There's no way nobody would have noticed. But no matter how much we looked, she turned up nowhere, so we eventually chalked it up to me misseeing things, and the game resumed. I was back on defense. This time, the enemy advancing from the left and right was gaining ground, and ten minutes into the restart, the gunfire was getting very close. I lay flat on the ground, gripping my gun tightly, and glared through the scope at the area where people might be, ready to shoot at any second. Then, I felt it—a gaze. I felt someone looking at me, and it was way too intense to just brush off as my imagination. I slowly shifted my eyes to the left, moving only my eyeballs. In the pitch-black darkness, about three meters away on the ground, a woman's head was sticking right out of the dirt. I realized it was the same woman. Her face was pale white, and her mouth was gaping open in an unnatural, impossibly wide grin, laughing hysterically. I couldn't hear any sound, but her face was twitching as she laughed. She was definitely laughing, staring straight at me. Like a periscope, that head slid across the ground—*za, za, za*—moving right in front of me and slowly closing the distance. I was in a state of absolute panic, but my body wouldn't obey; I was pinned to the ground, completely frozen. It’s true what they say—when things get that terrifying, you can't even scream. I think I spent a good thirty seconds just staring and locking eyes with that woman. When her face finally closed in to about 50 centimeters from mine, I finally managed to push my upper body up, but there was no strength in my legs. My knees buckled, and I couldn't stand. Sitting down, I scrambled backward on my hands and butt, and—though I still think it was the stupidest thing I could have done—I pointed my airgun at that face and pulled the trigger. At that moment, the woman's face twisted into an intensely terrifying scowl, glaring up at me from beneath, and smoothly vanished into thin air.
After that, playing the game was out of the question. I claimed I wasn't feeling well and spent the rest of the time sitting quietly under the rest area's tarp with a flashlight and a radio. I didn't want to ruin everyone else's fun, so I kept what I saw to themselves and didn't tell a soul. The next morning, as the event wrapped up and we were heading home, I finally confessed what happened to the friend who was driving me. Surprisingly, his reaction was, "...Wait, you too?" Apparently, every time he looked through the scope attached to his airgun, his entire field of vision was filled with that woman's face. After that, I could never bring myself to join a game at that field again. Damn it, even remembering it now makes my stomach turn. Sorry for the long post. And sorry if it wasn't all that scary.
Comments (-)